History

Trekiverse was established in 1991 as an ftp Alt.StarTrek.Creative archive at ftp.cis.ksu.edu under the administration of Joseph Young. He maintained it until April 1995 when he left Kansas State University. In July Alara Rogers took over as archivist, bringing the alt.sex.fetish.startrek archive as well as the alt.fan.q archive. In 1996, a Web Index was created with Matt C. Steenberg as Index Maintainer. By the end of the year, FAQ Maintainer Stephen Ratliff took over the web Index as Index Maintainer. Dina Lerret and Katie Redshoes joined the archive team in 1997, prior to Alara stepping down in 1998. From 1998 to 2000 the archive was run by Dina and Katie. When Dina stepped down in 2000, Katie became lead archivist. [1]

On November of 2000, the Alt.StarTrek.Creative Archive became Trekiverse. At that time, the archive was split under several different servers, knitted together by indexes. Hosts included Slashcity, Crosswinds, Jovian.net and others. The archive team owns trekiverse.org .net .com and .us .

From the inception, Trekiverse has archived stories from the newsgroups alt.startrek.creative, alt.startrek.creative.erotica, alt.startrek.creative.all-ages, alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated, alt.sex.fetish.startrek, and alt.fan.q. Direct submissions were possible via email, and even at one point via an upload form, but required archivist approval. There was for several years a search form written by Joshua Macy but a software update caused that to be dropped. [2]On the fifteenth of December in 2013 the archive was moved into an efiction system which will allow authors to upload without archivist intervention. [3]

Some Stats

In November 1997, a fan offered up these stats regarding archived fiction:

from 1987 to 1992 I believe about 300 stories were put in the archive (this is mostly from bitnet and usenet before asc was created in 1993)

A Bridge Between Print and Online

The line between reading fan fiction in print and online was sometimes not so easily traversed. A fan tells of her first exposure to Trekiverse:

Once I went to a site I’d heard of called Trekiverse, and there before me was an array of TOS and K/S stories, most of which were new to me. My juices began to flow! Of course I was convinced if something had magically shown up on my computer, it would likely disappear with an indistinct ‘poof’ in the middle of the night—or worse yet in the middle of a story. So I stocked up on floppy discs and started downloading stories from Trekiverse as fast as my PC would go. Was I hooked or was I hooked? As it turns out—I wasn’t hooked at all. I have my stacks of floppies, and with very few exceptions the stories on them remain unread. [5]

Archivists

Summary Editors

Recs,Reviews, Comments

Nonselective fiction archive for alt.startrek.creative. It's a bit like Star Trek's answer to ff.net, but unfortunately, I don't know of another large multi-author archive. Also runs the ASC awards."[9]

When I went looking for Star Trekfanfic and I found the old—um, I found the Trekiverse archive, which at that time was terribly—well, it was always a really horrible archive, terribly behind. But I found the ASCEM — I found the mailing list mirror of alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated and started lurking on the list. And from there I found links to enough people's personal web pages, which tended to have enough web rings and recs to have links to other people's personal—there was a big culture of everybody having like a GeoCities page or Angelfire or whatever at the time. Because there was supposed to be an official big Star Trek archive for everything that was published in any of the alt.startrek.creative hierarchy, but I think it was all being maintained by one archivist. And it was several years behind in the queue, it was not automatic.And it was also just very poorly designed, with no good search function ability. So pretty much people read on the mailing list or they read at personal websites.

[snipped]

There was a search function. I just remember it as not being terribly useful. There wasn't a sort of, like, just type in something and it will find it. There were a lot of menus that you could search by. Author name, or story title, or something. But it was very hard to do that "the story about this thing that I remember that time"—yeah.

It was difficult to use. I mean, part of it was just that, it was—had probably been state-of-the-art when it was coded, but that was already several years ago in 2000. And so there were frames within frames, within frames, within frames. It got very slow and clunky. And it tended to give you even on the great big things like "All Stories," it would not let you change how many things got displayed on one page. And, you know, it would do the thing with little numbers that collapsed in the corner of the screen and you'd just have to go through pages and pages. And for all that, when you finally got to the story page, they'd mostly been sort of just scraped off the newsgroup or the mailing list post with all of the headers intact, and just slapped right up there. So it still—if you were lucky, they were still formatted for newsgroup posting with the really short lines and the hard line breaks to preserve it. And if you weren't lucky they hadn't been properly formatted in the first place, and they were just all over the place. So it was just a plain ASCII file with no more formatting than you would have gotten as an e-mail message once you got there. Even the "part one of however" things were sometimes still in the file. If you wanted a pretty version you had to just copy the whole thing and do it yourself. But really all of that—like I said, it was 2000—standards were lower for this sort of thing. The main problem was it was something like a year and a half, two years behind.

I don't actually remember for sure, but I think Stephen Ratliff was doing the whole of the archiving himself? I mean, if there was a team, it was a really small team. I mean, the archive was, like, one person's pet project, and I'm sure it's gone down since then. It can't possibly be around. But yeah, it was being maintained by one person who didn't have time to keep up with it, and there wasn't, even though the idea was that it was supposed to include everything that was posted with "fic" in the header on any of that hierarchy—it didn't have any sort of automation in place. It certainly—it had been put together before the Automated Archive codes had been written.

It was just—yeah, it was one person's very clunky attempt to take on a project that they didn't have the time or the coding ability to handle. I mean, it was a very generous and community-minded thing to attempt. But it really needed more infrastructure, needed more resources. [10]